Abstract:
Data were collected during the 1997-1998 austral summer on voyages by the Aurora Australis and Southern Surveyor.

Taken from the abstract of the referenced paper:

Oceanographic processes in the subantarctic region contribute crucially to the physical and biogeochemical aspects of the global climate system. To explore and quantify these contributions, the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre ... (CRC) organised the SAZ Project, a multidisciplinary, multiship investigation carried out south of Australia in the austral summer of 1997-1998. Here we present a brief overview of the SAZ Project and some of its major results, as detailed in the 16 papers that follow in this special section.

The Southern Ocean plays an important role in the global oceanic overturning circulation and its influence on the carbon dioxide contents of the atmosphere. Deep waters upwelled to the surface are rich in nutrients and carbon dioxide. Air-sea interaction modifies the upwelled deep waters to form bottom, intermediate, and mode waters, which transport freshwater, oxygen, and carbon dioxide into the ocean interior. The overall effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide is a balance between outgassing from upwelled deep waters and uptake via both dissolution in newly formed waters (sometimes referred to as the solubility pump) and the transport of photosynthetically formed organic carbon to depth in settling particles (referred to as the biological pump). Determining the variations in the overturning circulation and the associated carbon fluxes in the past and their response to increased anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide in the future is essential to a full understanding of the controls on global climate. At present the upwelled nutrients are incompletely used. Low light in deep wind-mixed surface layers, lack of the micronutrient iron, and other factors restrict phtyoplankton production so that Southern Ocean surface waters represent the largest high-nutrient, low chlorophyll (HNLC) region in the world.